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Climbers Recount Murder on Famous Pakistan Peak

Climbers Recount Murder on Famous Pakistan Peak

Two climbers recount a night of terror as ten mountaineers were killed.

Pakistani rescuers stand by the coffin of a Slovakian climber killed by gunmen on Pakistan's Nanga Parbat.

Photograph by Farooq Naeem, AFP/Getty Images

Late
last Saturday night, gunmen dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered
Base Camp at Nanga Parbat, Pakistan's second-highest peak, and murdered ten foreign mountaineers and a Pakistani cook. A spokesman for an Islamist militant group later claimed credit for the killings. It was the first time climbers had been targeted in that manner in Pakistan. The victims included three Ukrainians, three Chinese, two Slovaks, a Nepali, a Pakistani, and a Lithuanian named Ernest Marksaitis.

Sher
Khan, a Pakistani climber, returned to Base Camp at Nanga Parbat at
about two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, June 22. He'd been suffering
from the effects of high altitude at Camp 1 and wanted to rest. Besides
the other mountaineers at Base Camp, many of whom were also sick, there
were about a dozen members of the staff, mostly local people. After a
cup of light soup, he climbed into his sleeping bag, still not feeling
well.

In this interview, he tells National Geographic what happened on the mountain that night.

What was the first sign of trouble?

I
woke up suddenly around 9:30 [in the evening]. I heard noises around
my tent. What's going on, I thought. Is somebody fighting or what? I
opened my tent flap a little and saw a person carrying a Russian
Kalashnikov about 20 meters away. He was wearing a local camouflage
uniform.

Then right in front of my tent I saw someone
with a terrorist. His name was Ernest, a climber from Lithuania. And he
was saying, "I am not American. I am not American."

From
another direction I heard, "Go out. Go out. Go, go." They were trying
to pull the Chinese out from their tents. "Taliban! Al-Qaeda!
Surrender!" They were trying to tell the foreigners to surrender.

Then
I saw two people coming toward my tent with a huge Kalashnikov and
some knives in their hands. I was trying to hide. The muzzle of the gun
came inside my tent and one person said, "Go! Go!" I said, "Look, I'm
Pakistani. I'm from Hunza. I am Ismaili. Please."

I
tried to recall the Kalima prayer. They said, "Come out!" They were
speaking Urdu [spoken in Pakistan] mostly. Then sometimes Pashto [spoken
in Afghanistan]. A few words in Shina, the local language. I tried to
get out of the tent and they suddenly said, stop! "Do you have money?" I
said, yes, I have a little. They said, okay get out the money. So I
tried to get back into the tent to get the money, but they kicked my
head with their boots and pulled me out of the tent.

They
said, 'We don't need you to collect the money. Just go.' They pointed
this gun to my head and took me to this line of other people and tied
me with a rope. What I saw then was eight or nine people tied with a
rope.There some Pakistani people also. Some Ukrainian people. This poor
Ernest was also tied. And one Nepali was also tied. And of course, it
was my time turn for them to tie me. They put me next to a Ukrainian guy
on the far right side.

They took a little time to
bring out more people. They went to each and every tent. "Taliban,
Al-Qaeda. Surrender." They were looking for foreign tourists. They
pointed a gun at me and a camp cook and said, "We know you can speak
English. Ask them who has money in their tents." They threatened the
climbers. "If we find money in your tent that you are hiding, we are
going to shoot you." Everybody was scared. We all said, yes, we have
money. The foreigners said, yes, we have Euros. Yes, we have dollars.
And one by one they took climbers to their different tents and
collected the money.

Then they asked for satellite
phones. "Who has Thuraya phones?" The climbers said "yes, we have
Thuraya phones, we have walkie-talkies." Again they took them to the
tents and collected the Thuraya phones. But this time they destroyed
all the phones and walkie talkies. Some they shot with Kalashnikovs.
Some they destroyed with stones. Whatever electronics they found, like
laptops, solar panels, they destroyed them with stones and with their
feet.

All this time I was begging them, please, we are Muslim, Ismaili from Hunza. We are Pakistanis. Why are you doing this?

Then
suddenly one person came to me and said, okay, if you are a Muslim,
tell me this, this, and this about morning prayer. But we Ismaili say a
different prayer. So I was helpless and kept quiet. Then another person
said to the first one, "Don't you know that these Ismaili people from
Hunza don't offer the same prayer?" So this ugly man went away from my
face.

Then somebody said, "Okay, let's separate these
three people from Hunza from the rope." So they released us, but told
us, "Don't try to look up. Stay on your knees."

Then
one person told the rest of the row, the Ukrainian people, the poor
Nepali and the Pakistani guy, Chinese people, to turn their faces in the
other direction. So that they could shoot them, you know. But I was
thinking, maybe they are not going to shoot them. Maybe they are
robbers. They've got the money and everything. Maybe they are going to
just go away.

But unfortunately, when they started to
move them in opposite directions, I was just stunned. I couldn't see
what was going on. I was on my knees, bent down, holding my body.

Then
suddenly I heard the sound of shooting. I looked a little up and what I
saw was this poor Ukrainian guy, who had been tied with me, I saw him
sitting down. Then after that moment, the shooting started in bursts.
Three times. Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrr. Three times like that. Then the
leader, this stupid ugly man, said, "Now stop firing. Don't fire
anybody." Then that son of a bitch came in between the dead bodies and
he personally shot them one by one. Dun. Dun. Dun. Every body he shot
down. And then afterward we heard slogans, like Allahu Akbar. Salam
Zindabad. Osama bin Laden Zindabad. And one stupid person said, "Today
these people are revenge for Osama bin Laden."

Then they were about fifty feet away and gathered for a while. Then they dispersed from that point downward.

Suddenly
it was totally quiet. It was a very silent moment. We waited for a
little while more, and we rushed to the kitchen where our cook found a
knife and our hands were finally freed. I tried to find a radio in my
tent. I found two walkie talkies and tried to contact my team mates at
Camp 2. I said, please, Camp 2, this is an emergency, can you hear me?
But everybody must have been sleeping. I went to each and every tent
looking for a Thuraya.

Then my Hunza friends said,
look, if they come again, they're going to kill us. We need to go
somewhere safe. So we tried to go toward Camp 1, but we didn't have the
right clothes or shoes because they had pulled us from our sleeping
bags. But we were really in terror. So the three of us climbed about
300 meters up the mountain to where we could look down on Base Camp. It
was about one o'clock and we found a kind of cave. We tried to hug
each other to get a little heat. We stayed there all night. We kept
trying to contact Camp 2, but I heard nothing until 7:30 in the
morning. I kept my radio on. Suddenly I heard one of my friends, Karim.
I told him what had happened, that people had died. I was crying.

Karim
contacted Nazir Sabir, a famous climber, who said that the Army was
already on the move. They were on the way with helicopters. So don't
move until they land at Base Camp, he said.

After the gunmen left Base Camp, did anyone check to see if the climbers were all dead?

At
that moment, it was very hard to stay in that place. To get closer to
the bodies. It was a really hard moment. But some people, including
myself, heard a strange noise from the body of one person. As if he was
still alive. Others were completely quiet. One person, he was doing
something like snoring. We heard that sound for a little while before we
left that camp. But when I asked some local people, staff, who were
tied in a tent nearby, they said, you know, we were hearing that snoring
sound until maybe two o'clock in the morning. It could be that he was
alive. I don't know.

It sounds just horrible.

You
know, to this day, I can't sleep. It was a week ago. Afterward the
Army took me and some of my friends for interrogation. They asked a lot
of questions. What kind of people were they? What kind of accent did
they have? I answered a lot of questions. Now I can't sleep. But if I
do, I wake up suddenly with any noises. It's also difficult for me to
go into a room. Because I feel like it's a tent and somebody is going
to come get me at gunpoint. It's very difficult.

Aleksandra
Dzik, a young climber from Poland, was also on the mountain that
night. But she, like 30 or so other mountaineers, was higher on the
peak at Camp 2 when the killings occurred. As leader of the
International Nanga Parbat Expedition 2013, Dzik was helping her team
of 20 prepare for an ascent of the peak when she heard the news. Ernest
was a member of her team.

In this interview, she tells National Geographic what she saw and heard on the mountain.

How did you learn of the attack?

It
was about 6 in the morning and we heard about it from Karim Hayat, a
Pakistani climber who had a tent near us at Camp 2. He'd gotten a call
from his climbing partner, Sher Khan, who was at Base Camp. Khan said
the Taliban had tied him up and carried him out of his tent and stood
him up right next to the people who were shot. But in the end they
didn't shoot him. He was in shock. When he managed to untie his hands,
he called Karim and warned him not to come down from Camp 2.

Of
course, when we heard what had happened, we tried to get in touch with
Ernest, the only member of our team who was still at Base Camp. Ernest
had decided to rest for a few days, because he was sick. He had
stomach problems. But he didn't reply. We were hoping maybe he had lost
his radio and escaped. Unfortunately, it wasn't true. Other
expeditions were also calling their members at Base Camp, but only
getting silence.

We decided to go back down to Base Camp. By the time we arrived, the Army was already there and the bodies had been taken away.

It must have been a shock.

We
couldn't believe it. We are climbers. Every one of us has lost friends
in the mountains. But it was always by the power of nature. It's a
game we all play. We accept the risk.

But here the deaths at Base Camp were caused by people. It was just terrible.

Someone
said to us, I will show you the place where they were all put
together, taken from their tents, and shot dead. There was blood on the
grass. It was the most terrible moment. There was also white down,
because they had been wearing down suits. And there were shells from
the gun.

Before the attack, a Slovakian climber at Camp
2 had also been having stomach problems. So his climbing partner,
another Slovakian, and his team leader, a Ukrainian, decided to take
him back down to Base Camp. They thought that would be the safest place
for a sick person, but in fact they all went to the one place that was
the most dangerous, and they were killed there.

That
night we were quite afraid. We put several tents together with three or
four people in each small tent to be close together.

The
next day we were evacuated by Army helicopters to an army base. Then
an Army aircraft took us to Islamabad, where our agencies and embassies
got us a hotel.

Do you feel safe now in Pakistan?

You
know, what can we do? We are quite scared. More anxious than before.
When we go out in the city, we are more careful how we dress, how we
look.

Before when we came to Pakistan, we got used to
the terrorism in this country, where people unfortunately are killed
every day. But we always felt that it didn't concern us, that it was
the problem of the Pakistanis and we were guests in their country. We
believed that we were untouchable.

Now we do not feel safe on the
streets, but we try to behave normally any way. Because it's the only
thing we can do against terrorism. To live normally. Not to give
terrorists what they want—to make us hide.

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